Managing professionals

Conclusion

The argument here has been that professionals are increasingly subject to management control, but a different type than that experienced by industrial workers. The distinction between ideological and technical proletarianization points to both parallels and contrasts between industrial and professional workers and suggests limitations of the Marxist and post-industrial theories of professionals as currently formulated. Some theoretical implications and directions for further study are noted briefly below.

The ideological proletarianization of professionals suggests a major subordination to management that contradicts the post-industrial thesis of growing “professional dominance.” While professionals maintain an unusual degree of skill and discretion in carrying out specialized technical procedures, they are increasingly stripped of authority to select their own projects or clients and to make major budgetary and policy decisions. This suggests less a post-industrial “new class” of governing experts than a new stratum of semi-autonomous highly credentialed and privileged technicians. The class position of such “professional-technicians” remains ambiguous, however, as their relative invulnerability to “deskilling” or knowledge erosion points to a subordination radically distinct from that of the industrial proletariat.

A major problematic related to class questions concerns the stability and depth of the forms of professional accommodation discussed here. Pervasive ideological desensitization and cooptation indicate a surprising reconciliation by professionals to their new position, reflecting, in part, the compensations in status, security and work-privileges received in exchange for the control they have relinquished. The integration of professionals within capitalist relations of production has, nonetheless, been marked by various forms of resistance, as manifest now in rapid unionization of teachers, engineers, some medical professionals, and some social welfare professionals. Michael Tigar, “A Lawyer for Social Change,” The Center Magazine, 1961, Vol. 4, No. 6, 27–35; McKinlay, Processing People. This suggests important sources of dissent that may counteract some of the processes of accommodation described here, particularly among a growing group of public sector professionals whose declining labor market prospects in the coming decade may spell not only increasing job-insecurity but declining income and heightened productivity demands.

Such adverse conditions may significantly transform professional ideology. Particularly significant will be the role of professional associations in confronting changing conditions. Authoritative historical accounts suggest that professional elites have played a major role in the evolution of the ideological accommodations described here.Larson, Professionalism; David Noble, America by Design, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974); Layton, Revolt. Professionalism, however, remains a potentially disintegrative force, providing professionals with a unique counter to corporatist or bureaucratic identities and ideologies. It is of major importance to assess the conditions under which professional ideology may evolve to highlight the underlying structural conflicts faced by professional employees and disrupt the ideological integration that now largely prevails.

This is most likely to develop under conditions projected by some theorists suggesting a radical new phase of technical proletarianization of professionals.Oppenheimer, “White Collar Revisited”; John McKinlay, Processing People (London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). While professionals are currently distinguished by unique technical autonomy, new information technologies, especially sophisticated generations of computers and microprocessors, have been discussed as a basis for the mechanization or routinization of professional work and the undermining of professional monopolies of knowledge.J. S. Maxmen, “Goodbye, Dr. Welby,” Social Policy, 1972, 3: 4:97–106; Marie R. Haug, “The Erosion of Professional Autonomy,” Unpublished manuscript. Theorists of proletarianization have proposed that the technical proletarianization of professionals may be facilitated not only by the rapid introduction of new technologies but by at least two other forces. The first is the shift in hospitals, universities and many other professional worksettings toward a management stratum that does not share the professional training of the staff. This new management, trained in schools of business, is regarded as less sympathetic to the classic aspirations of professionals for autonomy and more receptive to management systems which rationalize “deskilling” professional labor. The second factor cited as potentially facilitating technical proletarianization is changes in the market situation of many professional groups that may substantially weaken their bargaining power with their employers and render them less capable of resisting rationalization. The most ominous market considerations apply to public sector professionals, such as teachers, social workers, and many categories of local, state and federal employees, who are extraordinarily vulnerable to the fiscal crises affecting all levels of government. The ensuing demand for new austerities and efficiencies in public service imply not only the prospects of a significant new “reserve army” of unemployed professionals, but also important new managerial rationalizations, already apparent in new forms of quantified productivity controls imposed on social workers and teachers. These bear striking resemblance to earlier time-and-motionbased rationalizations of industrial labor (Cohen and Wagner), “Social Work Professionalism”; Bill Patry, “Taylorism Comes to the Social Services,” Monthly Review 30: 5, (1978). Nonetheless, it is obvious that the market prospects for different professional groups, even within the public sector, are highly varied, and that no uniform pattern regarding the strength of professional bargaining power is likely to emerge. In the long run, however, the prospects of technical proletarianization of professionals will be decisively determined not by shifts in short-term market power, nor by the other factors discussed above, but by structural forces which shape the systems of management control in advanced capitalism and determine whether it is actually in the interest of capital to seek to impose technical proletarianization on its professional employees. These issues are discussed more extensively in my 1982 book. Rapid technical proletarianization, while problematic, would almost certainly undermine the existing ideological accommodations, and produce explosive dissent.

The question of whether forms of Taylorization or other advanced systems of technical proletarianization are either possible or likely to develop in the professions has major theoretical implications, not only for the future of professional ideology, but for the meaning of ideological proletarianization as a form of capitalist labor control. As earlier indicated, new evidence of growing technical proletarianization would suggest that ideological proletarianization represents simply the first stage of the same historical process of proletarianization experienced by craft workers in the last century, and would support orthodox Marxist notions that professionals are slowly being assimilated to the broad working class in a society increasingly polarized between capital and labor.

In the absence of such evidence, however, new theoretical interpretations would be required. The most interesting is that ideological proletarianization may be a foundation of a new system of labor process control in “post-industrial” capitalism that does not require the technical proletarianization of workers in order to effectively subordinate them to capitalist production. Technical knowledge and skill controlled by workers is fundamentally inimical to capitalist production only if workers perceive their interests as different from management and are organized in a manner to enforce their own objectives. Where workers are characterized by strong internal discipline and identify with the objectives of their organization, their continuing possession of technical knowledge and skill may serve management's interests more than it threatens them. To the extent that effective systems exist for the integration and motivation of workers, imperatives of technical proletarianization diminish.

This suggests a final hypothesis that ideological proletarianization may be part of an emerging “post-industrial” system of managerial controls and inducements that securely integrates and motivates workers through assurances of relative technical autonomy. We have seen that professionals have accommodated to ideological controls by investing in “skill” and, in many instances, identifying with management ideology and objectives. This provides a basis for ideological integration which, along with other incentives linked to promotion and status may provide an effective new system for managing professionals without subjecting them to technical proletarianization. Future research on the labor process of professionals should illuminate the broader features of the emerging “post-industrial” system of management and explore its consequences for the class consciousness of professionals and the ideology of professionalism.